Famous John Kenneth Galbraith Quotations

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"Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"A bad book is the worse that it cannot repent. It has not been the devil's policy to keep the masses of mankind in ignorance; but finding that they will read, he is doing all in his power to poison their books."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"Change comes not from men and women changing their minds, but from the change from one generation to the next."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"Few people at the beginning of the ninteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"Humor is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in gaining and holding attention. But it has no persuasive value at all."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"In all life one should comfort the afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"In economics, the majority is always wrong."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"In the choice between changing ones mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled sea of thought."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"Liberalism is, I think, resurgent. One reason is that more and more people are so painfully aware of the alternative."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"People fo privilage will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"People are the common denominator of progress. So... no improvement is possible with unimproved people, and advance is certain when people are liberated and educated. It would be wrong to dismiss the importance of roads, railroads, power plants, mills, and the other familiar furniture of economic development.... But we are coming to realize... that there is a certain sterility in economic monuments that stand alone in a sea of illiteracy. Conquest of illiteracy comes first."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"Technology means the systematic application of scientific or other organized knowledge to practical tasks."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character-building value of privation for the poor."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"The salary of the chief executive of the large corporations is not an award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm gesture by the individual to himself."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"Washington is a place where people praise courage and act on elaborate personal cost-benefit calculations."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"Where humor is concerned there are no standards - no one can say what is good or bad, although you can be sure that everyone will."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"No society ever seems to have succumbed to boredom. Man has developed an obvious capacity for surviving the pompous reiteration of the commonplace."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"Meetings are a great trap. Soon you find yourself trying to get agreement and then the people who disagree come to think they have a right to be persuaded. However, they are indispensable when you don't want to do anything."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"There are a few ironclad rules of diplomancy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"Few can believe that suffering, especially by others, is in vain. Anything that is disagreeable must surely have beneficial economic effects."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"In the usual (though certainly not in every) public decision on economic policy, the choice is between courses that are almost equally good or equally bad. It is the narrowest decisions that are most ardently debated. If the world is lucky enough to enjoy peace, it may even one day make the discovery, to the horror of doctrinaire free-enterprisers and doctrinaire planners alike, that what is called capitalism and what is called socialism are both capable of working quite well."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"In economics, hope and faith coexist with great scientific pretension and also a deep desire for respectability."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"In economics the majority is always wrong."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"More die in the United States from too much food that from too little."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"Among all the world's races, some obscure Bedouin tribes possibly apart, Americans are the most prone to misinformation. This is not the consequence of any special preference for mendacity, although at the higher levels of their public administration that tendency is impressive. It is rather that so much of what they themselves believe is wrong."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"There is something wonderful in seeing a wrong-headed majority assailed by truth."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man's greatest source of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety. Over all history it has oppressed nearly all people in one of two ways: either it has been abundant and very unreliable, or reliable and very scarce."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"Money differs from an automobile or mistress in being equally important to those who have it and those who do not."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"Once the visitor was told rather repetitively that this city was the melting pot; never before in history had so many people of such varied languages, customs, colors and culinary habits lived so amicably together. Although New York remains peaceful by most standards, this self-congratulation is now less often heard, since it was discovered some years ago that racial harmony depended unduly on the willingness of the blacks (and latterly the Puerto Ricans) to do for the other races the meanest jobs at the lowest wages and then to return to live by themselves in the worst slums."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put on the troubled seas of thought."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"Any consideration of the life and larger social existence of the modern corporate man begins and also largely ends with the effect of one all-embracing force. That is organization -- the highly structured assemblage of men, and now some women, of which he is a part. It is to this, at the expense of family, friends, sex, recreation and sometimes health and effective control of alcoholic intake, that he is expected to devote his energies."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"We all agree that pessimism is a mark of superior intellect."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"Man, at least when educated, is a pessimist. He believes it safer not to reflect on his achievements; Jove is known to strike such people down."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"All successful revolutions are the kicking in of a rotten door. The violence of revolutions is the violence of men who charge into a vacuum."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"There is an insistent tendency among serious social scientists to think of any institution which features rhymed and singing commercials, intense and lachrymose voices urging highly improbable enjoyment, caricatures of the human esophagus in normal and impaired operation, and which hints implausibly at opportunities for antiseptic seduction as inherently trivial. This is a great mistake. The industrial system is profoundly dependent on commercial television and could not exist in its present form without it."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"The real accomplishment of modern science and technology consists in taking ordinary men, informing them narrowly and deeply and then, through appropriate organization, arranging to have their knowledge combined with that of other specialized but equally ordinary men. This dispenses with the need for genius. The resulting performance, though less inspiring, is far more predictable."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"Increasingly in recent times we have come first to identify the remedy that is most agreeable, most convenient, most in accord with major pecuniary or political interest, the one that reflects our available faculty for action; then we move from the remedy so available or desired back to a cause to which that remedy is relevant."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"The conspicuously wealthy turn up urging the character building values of the privation of the poor."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"There's a certain part of the contented majority who love anybody who is worth a billion dollars."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"In the United States, though power corrupts, the expectation of power paralyzes."
by John Kenneth Galbraith
"Money is a singular thing. It ranks with love as man's greatest source of joy. And with death as his greatest source of anxiety. Over all hist..."
by John Kenneth Galbraith


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